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old chanterelles
Sunday, August 11 2019
This morning I awoke from a dream that had me and Gretchen (and perhaps others) in some sketchy country, I want to say Egypt, and someone in our party had been bragging about a modest advance he or she had gotten for a book that was being written. Evidently this has been overheard by one of the natives, who then proceeded to take us all captive and hold us for ransom. I'm not sure where things were when the dream ended.
Yesterday I'd done some more work on the web code that I use to control the Speakerbot (aka Disturbatron). I wanted that code to be a bit more finished should I want to use it as the basis of other projects. Most of this work consisted of removing the last traces of the old URL-based refresh-dependent code that made the it feel like a classic website. I rewrote the code that generates a browseable table of audio files so that instead being rendered by the PHP, it was rendered by Javascript from a JSON object produced by the PHP backend (I'd actually written that part of the backend weeks before). This offered a number of advantages, particularly when showing the results of files being uploaded and deleted. By also saving information about the last front-end sort performed, I could execute a minimal-seeming refresh of the file list, with the only difference from the way it had been being whatever deletion or renaming had occurred to necessitate a re-render. I should mention that none of this code made use of any frameworks; it was all done in procedural-style vanilla JS and vanilla PHP. And it's all available for download from Github.
It was nice to be doing some work with web technologies that produced such rapid results; in my professional life of late, satisfying results usually come only after months of work. It's good to break up such work with something totally different, to (at minimum) reward the other parts of the brain and other organs of the body for their patience while code was being cranked out. I went to the stone wall I've been working off the Stick Trail about 100 feet south of the Chamomile and added a few stones. Both going to and coming back from that wall, I saw a large frog languishing in the trail, and since he didn't seem to be moving very fast, I went and got my camera. He was still there when I returned, and I got a number of good pictures. I was startled by something large and black in the corner of my eye. It was Ramona, who had decided to join me. Now that I was walking a dog, I thought I'd venture up the escarpment to the west and look to see if there were any chanterelle mushrooms along the wetlands south of the bottom of the Chamomile Headwaters Trail. I found some, perhaps enough to make a small one-person meal, but they were a bit old, like they'd peaked a week ago or so.
This evening, I was listening to Asia, the supergroup from the 1980s, having been reminded of it by dining yesterday at its namesake restaurant in Stone Ridge. I hadn't heard some of those songs since the actual 1980s, and some of them were pretty good (even if I am not a fan of some of the early-80s synth sounds or the occasionally Barry Manilowesque quality of John Wetton's voice). My favorite rediscovery tonight was the song "Sole Survivor." Mostly what I like in the song is the way the instruments snap down out of their reverie just before Wetton starts singing a verse.
A large frog I encountered today in the Stick Trail.
Ramona next to that wall I've been building near the Stick Trail about 100 feet south of the Chamomile.
A garter snake sunning him or herself in the Farm Road.
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